The Anonymous Complaint at 00:17

"Complete any received complaint within 30 seconds."

Night complaints transfer coordinator Im Seoha read that line and had already opened the file.

No sender. No address.

The handler field showed her own employee number, which hadn't been there a moment before.

For a first mistake on the first day of her contract, the screen was being far too helpful. A red number appeared in the upper right. 00:27. It dropped by one every second. Where the close and hold buttons should have been, there was nothing now, just a blue Complete button left standing alone.

Seoha took her hand off the mouse.

The transfer procedure at the Southwest City Facilities Service night center was simple. Confirm the address, attach a facility code, hand it to the on duty field team. Complete it once field confirmation comes back. The new hire training video had repeated the same sequence three times. Nowhere did it say to complete a complaint with no sender, no address, and no field team first.

00:23.

She checked the time in the lower left of the screen. 12:17 AM. The wall clock also read 12:17. Its second hand wasn't moving.

"Yuna. Clear the paper jam on printer four."

Beside her, Kim Yuna rolled her chair over and leaned in.

"Paper complaints on your first day? Anyway, that thing only has a Complete button."

"That's why I need it printed first. And a screen capture. Not now, in order. 12:17, file opened. Sender field blank. Address field blank. Handler..."

Seoha stopped talking. The number in the handler field was 4721. The same number printed under the photo on her own employee badge.

00:18.

Yuna hit the shortcut key. The capture notification popped up, but no file appeared in the save folder. Instead the printer woke up. The feed roller swallowed a blank sheet and pushed it back out.

The printout's sender and address fields were empty. The handler field read 4721. The screen and the paper said the same thing.

Seoha wrote 0:17 in pen next to the print timestamp. You believe it once two channels agree. Nam Sangho used to say that all the time, back at her old post. On the first day she'd come back to find him, a nameless complaint had found her first.

00:13.

"Don't press Complete."

Team lead Kang Mijin came running from the direction of the break room. She had two paper cups in one hand. Coffee spilled over the back of her hand, but she didn't let go of the cups.

"On what grounds?"

"Not the best moment to ask that, with ten seconds left."

"What happens if I press it?"

Mijin's eyes stopped on the employee number on the printout. Whatever joke had been in her face was gone now.

"A Complete with no target gets filled in by the handler."

"With a person?"

"We'll confirm that properly once this is over. Yuna, don't touch the server power, just hold onto the printout. Seoha, the power cable behind the tower. Just the tower, not the monitor."

00:09.

Seoha knelt under the desk. The power strip had the tower, monitor, phone, and printer all plugged in together, with a small individual switch in front of each plug. Flip the wrong one and the proof of what got cut disappears with it. A white label reading Seat 4 was wrapped around the tower's plug. The monitor had its own separate switch.

"Wouldn't cutting the server be faster?"

"The server isn't only holding this." Mijin opened the cover on the line panel. "Escalators, pump stations, public parking. Unless you want to cover an entire city on tonight's overtime pay, everyone pulls their own line."

00:06.

Mijin found a gray cable in the bundle labeled external line and pressed a finger to it. She didn't pull it yet. She looked at Seoha instead. The person with lead authority was waiting on a new hire's answer.

"We keep the original," Seoha said. "We don't erase the screen or the ticket."

"Good. On three."

Yuna caught the second sheet with both hands as it fed out of the printer at length. Mijin didn't count to three. The moment the number hit 00:03, she pulled the gray cable. At the same instant, Seoha flipped the switch on tower 4.

The monitor went black, not because the power had cut but because the input signal had. The orange standby light in the lower right stayed on.

The fluorescent lights on the center's ceiling stayed the same. The server room fans didn't stop. On Yuna's computer, the external facility status kept reporting normal. Only the phone at seat 4 made the sound of a receiver being set down.

Even though no one had touched it.

Mijin dropped the pulled cable end into an empty paper cup. Yuna spread the printout flat on the desk instead of folding it. Seoha wrote down, separately, the time the tower switch went down and the time the line was pulled. They'd cut both at once, so she still didn't know which one had stopped the count.

"Leave the line as is. Bring the tower back up only."

Seoha started to move without waiting for an answer, then stopped her hand. She looked at Mijin, then Yuna in turn. Mijin, without taking her eyes off the paper, raised a thumb. Yuna hooked a finger on the edge of the second printout and nodded.

She flipped the switch. The fan spun up and the company logo appeared. The boot was shorter than usual. It skipped the login screen and went straight to the ticket that had been open earlier.

A single number remained in the center of the black window.

00:03.

The count had stopped. The blue Complete button was gone too. But the ticket window hadn't closed. Handler 4721 was still there.

Yuna pointed at the screen.

"This isn't resolved, right?"

"It's not on hold either," Seoha said. "It's stopped while still open."

"Adjusting fast for a first day. Usually it takes the company about three months to leave a problem stopped instead of solved."

Under normal circumstances, Mijin's joke would have found a place to land. Yuna's mouth started to curl up and then stopped, because the printer spat out a third sheet.

This time it wasn't a complaint printout.

It was an entry log.

A form that could only be printed from the terminal by the center's entrance came out of printer 4 instead. The paper shift roster listed five people on night shift. Center staff Kang Mijin, Kim Yuna, Park Gitae, Im Seoha. The fifth, Baek Dowon, was marked as dispatched to the field at 11:48 PM. That meant four people should show up on the entry log.

Seoha didn't check her own name first. She checked the print timestamp. 12:20 AM. Then she went through the employee numbers, entry times, and signature fields in order. All of it looked normal.

"Let's check the terminal."

Mijin blocked the doorway.

"Don't type the name in again."

"Do you know why?"

"No. I just don't want us filling in an unfamiliar name field with a name."

It wasn't an order. It was a limit she was setting for herself first. Seoha nodded once. She gathered the printouts, the paper roster, and her employee badge. Yuna stayed at seat 4 and rested both hands on the keyboard. Since the capture wouldn't save, she'd taken to counting the characters on the screen instead.

"Handler's employee number, four digits. Address, zero characters. Sender, zero characters. Countdown stopped at three."

"If the screen changes, tell me by voice first."

"Yep. I mean, yes. No more jokes."

The entry terminal stood in a narrow passage beside the fire door. Getting there meant passing between the copier and the filing cabinets, through four rows of desks. Normally it was the path used for carrying in late night food. Right now it was the only route that never lost sight of seat 4.

Seoha didn't walk ahead. She moved alongside Mijin, unfolding the paper roster as she went. On Baek Dowon's field dispatch line was Mijin's blue signature. They couldn't afford to touch the status of someone currently out in the field.

"Have you seen a ticket like that before?"

"Something like it."

"When?"

Mijin wiped her coffee stained hand on her pants. "Team lead Nam Sangho's last shift."

Seoha's feet stopped in front of the copier.

"Why didn't you say this during training?"

"If I'd said it, would you not have opened it?"

"At least I would have had a choice."

Instead of answering, Mijin pointed at the terminal screen first. It was a habit of hers, assigning work to end an argument. Seoha looked at that pointing finger, then shifted her eyes to the screen.

The electronic log showed four people entering the center. That was the expected number. But one name was short.

"The headcount is right," Seoha said, pointing at the terminal. "The person is wrong."

She checked the employee numbers from the top. Mijin's matched. Yuna's matched. Security guard Park Gitae's matched. And 4721 was still there on the last line.

Only the name was different.

Where it should have read `Im Seoha`, it read `Seoha`.

Seoha held up her employee badge next to the terminal. The plastic card clearly read the three characters, Im Seoha. The paper roster matched too. Only the electronic log had lost one.

Below the terminal, the cursor on a small keyboard blinked. An input field opened on its own, prompting her to fill in the blank.

Mijin reached for it, but Seoha closed the keyboard cover first.

"We don't type it in."

"I was going to check."

Seoha set her employee badge on top of the keyboard cover. "Checking ends with a physical object. Typing is a new action."

She didn't turn off the terminal's power. She didn't photograph the screen either. She picked out the numbers to read to Yuna over the intercom line. Current time, employee number, the single missing character. She didn't say Nam Sangho's name. Between that complaint and Sangho, there was still no second piece of evidence besides Mijin's memory.

"Yuna, handing this off. 12:20 AM. Four entrants on the electronic log. Employee number 4721 still present. First character of the name missing."

Keyboard tapping came through the receiver.

"Got it. Three original printouts. Seat 4 ticket still open. Countdown stopped at 3 seconds."

"Preserve Baek Dowon's field dispatch status too. Him showing up on paper but not on the electronic entry log is expected."

Instead of answering, Yuna tapped the paper once. A dry sound carried over the mic. Separate from confirming by voice, it was a signal that the physical object was here.

Seoha wrote the same details in the margin of the paper roster. Without a word, Mijin set her own employee badge down beside it. Not a team lead's signature, but adding the belongings of whoever was actually standing here as evidence.

Only then did Seoha realize that by opening the ticket, she'd gained something for the first time. She still didn't know what disappeared when Complete got pressed. But if you didn't erase the screen and instead cut the lines separately, you could at least buy time. If she'd cut it alone, she might have taken down the server and touched other facilities along with it.

The makeshift survival method was slower than the right answer, and it needed three pairs of hands.

Mijin looked down at the paper cup. The pulled cable end trembled faintly at the edge of the cooling coffee.

"We'll calculate overtime pay after we clock out alive."

She wasn't smiling.

The cursor on the electronic log moved one space over.

From `Seoha`, the `Se` was erased.